At the end of each session, I usually give coaching clients an exercise or, if they’ve created an action point for themselves, I ask if they’d like me to hold them accountable for doing what they said they would do. Most say yes 🙂 One client went beyond a yes and even created a system on how I could hold him accountable exactly – which is what I’ll be sharing with you today.

Since then, I’ve actually adopted this awesome accountability system with other coaching clients and it’s worked beautifully so far. Perhaps it’ll work for you too.

“So, is life coaching like getting coached on a sport – except the sport is my life?”

This question may sound a little ditzy but whoever asks that is actually on to something.

To most of us, life coaching sounds like an awesome idea and, at the same time, a completely vague concept. What is it?

In its simplest form, life coaching is just a long conversation between two people where one person needs help figuring something out and the other person, your coach, commits to helping by being a sounding board, a truth teller, an advocate and, an accountability partner.

A coach is basically your go-to person for developing your own clarity, direction and, optimism. Through asking great, powerful questions, providing you structure and empowering you to create solutions, life coaches walk with you towards defining your dreams, achieving personal goals and, breaking through to the next level in your self-awareness and performance.

Still confusing? Yeah, I know right? When there are a whole lot of positive words just strung together, what they all actually mean can fly over our head. To keep us on the ground, just like coaches do, I’ve spoken to three people who’ve worked with life coaches before. They shared what they got from their conversations with a life coach.

Obviously, as you’ll see from the title of this post, I haven’t been a Life Coach for very long… which is precisely the reason why I just had to write this post.

I’ve only been a life coach for approximately six months and in that short time, I’ve learned so much about people, it’s insane. I have no ambitions of entertaining the idea that I’m expert, nor that I already know exactly what I’m doing either 😉 I’m just doing my best. I can say thought that I feel like very slowly but surely, my views on the world before me are changing.

So what have I learned as someone whose job it is to truly, actively listen to people? I’m so excited to share it with you.

On this episode of the #CoachYourself series, I’d like to share a great tool for beginning any kind of self-inquiry: The Wheel of Life ♥

I first encountered this exercise when I was a coach-in-training with The TLC Solution. On the very first day of our training, we were asked to fill out our own Wheel of Life and immediately, coach each other with that as a jump-off point! Things were happening too fast for me to even doubt if I could coach or not but blessedly, the Wheel of Life did around 60% of the work for me.

Let me explain how it works – then you’ll get why it’s such a great starting point for self-inquiry.

Yesterday, after a private yoga class, a student of mine and I were talking and I ended up saying in Filipino, “There’s a huge difference between the quality of our decisions when we’re centered and calm and the quality of our decisions when we’re scattered and stressed.”

In my head, I laughed to myself because it’s exactly what I needed to hear for myself.

As I’m writing this, it’s been a little over a week since I got home from a two-month teaching gig in Bali. I expected to have a challenging time integrating myself back in Manila life and… let’s just say it’s a little harder than I expected. In the wake of settling back in, having a new long-term goal to reach, and going back to an expensive city technically jobless, I’ve been struggling to ground myself. It’s daily work and every day I’m feeling a little better than I did before so I’m grateful.

Yesterday’s breakthrough, talking about the quality of decisions, made me realize that I had lost my clarity. More than ever, I understand how easily clarity can be lost, and how valuable it actually is. And what did I feel like when I returned to clarity? Relieved. I felt soooo relieved. It felt like a return to my true goals, a return to a sense of purpose, a return to hope 🙂 More?

Energy: Knowing what to do gave me a renewed boost of energy

Letting go: Clarity helped me understand what efforts at grounding and abundance were actually unproductive. It’s a push towards acting with long-term goals in mind, in the present

Creativity!: Clear goals means our boundless creativity has a direct object, something to pour forth into. What we want to create is clear. Figuring out how to do it is play, or it can be if we let it 🙂

Breathing space: Here’s where I felt clarity’s gifts the most. When you’re clear, it’s easy to understand that you don’t have to do everything, you don’t have to be everything, you don’t have to have everything now, you don’t have to do something even if it seems to make sense. In fact “what makes sense,” will change once you’re clear-seeing, goal-seeing 🙂

Now, enough about clarity. How do I get there? Well. With a looooooot of work. Haha!

I’m now starting this series on my blog, #CoachYourself. I hope to share tools by which we can be our own life coach, given enough time and dedication to daily inner work. I find it fitting that our first tool will be about clarity. I’m calling it, The Goal Funnel.

Part of the things I had to do as I finished my coaching essentials course with The TLC Solution was a research paper – anything to do with coaching. Of course, mine was on yoga 🙂

I had an inkling already that yoga and coaching would make a beautiful partnership – otherwise I wouldn’t have been so focused in pursuing it. For the practitioners out there, I’m sure we’ve all said at one point or another, “I’m a completely different person now compared to the me before yoga.” The practice is transformative on its own – what more if you add in life coaching to the mix?

My own experience of going through the workshop and being part of a few coaching conversations as a client showed me that it’s a big fat YES! to yoga and coaching 🙂 My hypothesis was correct!

I’m going to write a bit more about what training was like soon but, in this post I’d like to share my research on why and how yoga and coaching work well together by posting a few excerpts from my research paper — in the hope of enlightening coaches, yoga teachers, and even those interested in coaching.

Disclaimer: the last time I wrote a paper was in college so the citations etc might just suck 🙂

At the start of the year, even before 2015 ended, I decided that one of the things I wanted to become was a life coach. In my vision board I wrote down with specificity, “The sign of which I should take first, coaching, counseling, or yoga therapy will make itself known very early on and with undoubted clarity.”

At the start of my yoga teacher journey into the unknown I attended her Your Awesome Year workshop where we mapped out what the next 5 years would look like. It was a scary and large process but lo and behold, less than a year since that workshop I found that what I had set out to be was actually happening! (READ: On teaching: Passing the one-year mark, learning how to love) So when she suggested, among her many suggestions, to take training where she too took training, I jumped at the chance 🙂

Our training consists of face-to-face whole day learning and more importantly, 12 hours of required coaching experience and a research paper. Having recently just finished day 2 out of the 3 days of “classroom” learning, I can now say more and more that life coaching is part of my soul path.

One of the most important things I’m truly learning is how to listen actively and constructively, how to see people.